The Pan Pan company and its director Gavin Quinn have always made an absurdist, dysfunctional kind of theatre, but you wonder at the Ozzie critics who sent this show home from the Adelaide festival this year with an award.
The audience are welcomed into a bright white space by three actors who beam idiotically at us for a while. Bored with each other, they focus their confessional, often lewd, attentions on us, even climbing among the seats to hug people.
Then the lights go down, and the kids knuckle down to daft, disjointed, knockabout routines. The actors, Kevin Hely, Emma McIvor and James Hosty, speak as "themselves".
There are things you may never have seen before in a theatre, such as a man pulling out his penis and pissing into a bucket, stopping, starting again, stopping and starting. Hosty, a dancer-actor, displays wonderful muscle control here - I'm sure I would have dried, as they say.
Grotesquely pulled faces, ridiculous songs and eye-poke routines degenerate into wrestling that is more bum-sniffingly sexual than aggressive. McIvor blow-jobs a microphone, and Hely complains how his obsessive hygiene has left him with a hand smelling of "cunt and Domestos".
It's like some silly party game, and the only adrenalising factor is Brian Mooney's music and howling feedback loops. Mooney also provides the goofed-out guitar behind the final jilted love song - perhaps the key to Quinn's opus.
The piece seems hypnotised by theory and the psychodrama of the rehearsal studio. At 80 minutes it is way overlength, and by the time it shrieks to a halt, it has disappeared up its own behind.
Until October 10. Box office: 00 353 1 677 0643 .
